Posts tagged with 'opensource'

After a little over 6 years, I am embarking on a new adventure. Today is my last day at Canonical, it’s bitter sweet saying goodbye precisely because it has been such a joy and an honor to be working here with so many amazing, talented and friendly people. But I am leaving by choice, and for an opportunity that makes me as excited as leaving makes me sad.

Goodbye Canonical

I’ve worked at Canonical longer than I’ve worked at any company, and I can honestly say I’ve grown more here both personally and professionally than I have anywhere else. It launched my career as a Community Manager, learning from the very best in the industry how to grow, nurture, and excite a world full of people who share the same ideals. I owe so many thanks (and beers) to Jono Bacon, David Planella, Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, Nicholas Skaggs, Alan Pope, Kyle Nitzsche and now also Martin Wimpress. I also couldn’t have done any of this without the passion and contributions of everybody in the Ubuntu community who came together around what we were doing.

As everybody knows by now, Canonical has been undergoing significant changes in order to set it down the road to where it needs to be as a company. And while these changes aren’t the reason for my leaving, it did force me to think about where I wanted to go with my future, and what changes were needed to get me there. Canonical is still doing important work, I’m confident it’s going to continue making a huge impact on the technology and open source worlds and I wish it nothing but success. But ultimately I decided that where I wanted to be was along a different path.

Of course I have to talk about the Ubuntu community here. As big of an impact as Canonical had on my life, it’s only a portion of the impact that the community has had. From the first time I attended a Florida LoCo Team event, I was hooked. I had participated in open source projects before, but that was when I truly understood what the open source community was about. Everybody I met, online or in person, went out of their way to make me feel welcome, valuable, and appreciated. In fact, it was the community that lead me to work for Canonical in the first place, and it was the community work I did that played a big role in me being qualified for the job. I want to give a special shout out to Daniel Holbach and Jorge Castro, who built me up from a random contributor to a project owner, and to Elizabeth Joseph and Laura Faulty who encouraged me to take on leadership roles in the community. I’ve made so many close and lasting friendships by being a part of this amazing group of people, and that’s something I will value forever. I was a community member for years before I joined Canonical, and I’m not going anywhere now. Expect to see me around on IRC, mailing lists and other community projects for a long time to come.

Hello Endless

Next week I will be joining the team at Endless as their Community Manager. Endless is an order of magnitude smaller than Canonical, and they have a young community that it still getting off the ground. So even though I’ll have the same role I had before, there will be new and exciting challenges involved. But the passion is there, both in the company and the community, to really explode into something big and impactful. In the coming months I will be working to setup the tools, processes and communication that will be needed to help that community grow and flourish. After meeting with many of the current Endless employees, I know that my job will be made easier by their existing commitment to both their own community and their upstream communities.

What really drew me to Endless was the company’s mission. It’s not just about making a great open source project that is shared with the world, they have a specific focus on social good and improving the lives of people who the current technology isn’t supporting. As one employee succinctly put it to me: the whole world, empowered. Those who know me well will understand why this resonates with me. For years I’ve been involved in open source projects aimed at early childhood education and supporting those in poverty or places without the infrastructure that most modern technology requires. And while Ubuntu covers much of this, it wasn’t the primary focus. Being able to work full time on a project that so closely aligned with my personal mission was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

Broader horizons

Over the past several months I’ve been expanding the number of communities I’m involved in. This is going to increase significantly in my new role at Endless, where I will be working more frequently with upstream and side-stream projects on areas of mutual benefit and interest. I’ve already started to work more with KDE, and I look forward to becoming active in GNOME and other open source desktops soon.

I will also continue to grow my independent project, Phoenicia, which has a similar mission to Endless but a different technology and audience. Now that this is no longer competing in the XPRIZE competition, it releases some restrictions that we had to operate under and frees us to investigate new areas of innovation and collaboration. If you’re interested in game development, or making an impact on the lives of children around the world, come and see what we’re doing.

Late last year Amazon introduce a new EC2 image customized for Machine Learning (ML) workloads. To make things easier for data scientists and researchers, Amazon worked on including a selection of ML libraries into these images so they wouldn’t have to go through the process of downloading and installing them (and often times building them) themselves.

But while this saved work for the researchers, it was no small task for Amazon’s engineers. To keep offering the latest version of these libraries they had to repeat this work every time there was a new release , which was quite often for some of them. Worst of all they didn’t have a ready-made way to update those libraries on instances that were already running!

By this time they’d heard about Snaps and the work we’ve been doing with them in the cloud, so they asked if it might be a solution to their problems. Normally we wouldn’t Snap libraries like this, we would encourage applications to bundle them into their own Snap package. But these libraries had an unusual use-case: the applications that needed them weren’t mean to be distributed. Instead the application would exist to analyze a specific data set for a specific person. So as odd as it may sound, the application developer was the end user here, and the library was the end product, which made it fit into the Snap use case.

To get them started I worked on developing a proof of concept based on MXNet, one of their most used ML libraries. The source code for it is part C++, part Python, and Snapcraft makes working with both together a breeze, even with the extra preparation steps needed by MXNet’s build instructions. My snapcraft.yaml could first compile the core library and then build the Python modules that wrap it, pulling in dependencies from the Ubuntu archives and Pypi as needed.

This was all that was needed to provide a consumable Snap package for MXNet. After installing it you would just need to add the snap’s path to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PYTHONPATH environment variables so it would be found, but after that everything Just Worked! For an added convenience I provided a python binary in the snap, wrapped in a script that would set these environment variables automatically, so any external code that needed to use MXNet from the snap could simply be called with /snap/bin/mxnet.python rather than /usr/bin/python (or, rather, just mxnet.python because /snap/bin/ is already in PATH).

I’m now working with upstream MXNet to get them building regular releases of this snap package to make it available to Amazon’s users and anyone else. The Amazon team is also seeking similar snap packages from their other ML libraries. If you are a user or contributor to any of these libraries, and you want to make it easier than ever for people to get the latest and greatest versions of them, let’s get together and make it happen! My MXNet example linked to above should give you a good starting point, and we’re always happy to help you with your snapcraft.yaml in #snapcraft on rocket.ubuntu.com.

If you’re just curious to try it out ourself, you can download my snap and then follow along with the MXNet tutorial, using the above mentioned mxnet.python for your interactive python shell.

During the Ubuntu Online Summit last week, my colleague Daniel Holbach came up with what he called a “10 day challenge” to some of the engineering manager directing the convergence work in Ubuntu. The idea is simple, try and use only the Unity 8 desktop for 10 working days (two weeks). I thought this was a great way to really identify how close it is to being usable by most Ubuntu users, as well as finding the bugs that cause the most pain in making the switch. So on Friday of last week, with UOS over, I took up the challenge.

Below I will discuss all of the steps that I went through to get it working to my needs. They are not the “official” way of doing it (there isn’t an official way to do all this yet) and they won’t cover every usage scenario, just the ones I faced. If you want to try this challenge yourself they will help you get started. If at any time you get stuck, you can find help in the #ubuntu-unity channel on Freenode, where the developers behind all of these components are very friendly and helpful.

Getting Unity 8

To get started you first need to be on the latest release of Ubuntu. I am using Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), which is the best release for testing Unity 8. You will also need the stable-phone-overlay PPA. Don’t let the name fool you, it’s not just for phones, but it is where you will find the very latest packages for Mir, Unity 8, Libertine and other components you will need. You can install is with this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ci-train-ppa-service/stable-phone-overlay

Then you will need to install the Unity 8 session package, so that you can select it from the login screen:

sudo apt install unity8-desktop-session

Note: The package above used to be unity8-desktop-session-mir but was renamed to just unity-desktop-session.

When I did this there was a bug in the libhybris package that was causing Mir to try and use some Android stuff, which clearly isn’t available on my laptop. The fix wasn’t yet in the PPA, so I had to take the additional step of installing a fix from our continuous integration system (Note: originally the command below used silo 53, but I’ve been told it is now in silo 31). If you get a black screen when trying to start your Unity 8 session, you probably need this too.

This was enough to get Unity 8 to load for me, but all my apps would crash within a half second of being launched. It turned out to be a problem with the cgroups manager, specifically the cgmanager service was disabled for me (I suspect this was leftover configurations from previous attempts at using Unity 8). After re-enabling it, I was able to log back into Unity 8 and start using apps!

sudo systemctl enable cgmanager

Essential Core Apps

The first thing you’ll notice is that you don’t have many apps available in Unity 8. I had probably more than most, having installed some Ubuntu SDK apps natively on my laptop already. If you haven’t installed the webbrowser-app already, you should. It’s in the Xenial archive and the PPA you added above, so just

sudo apt install webbrowser-app

But that will only get you so far. What you really need are a terminal and file manager. Fortunately those have been created as part of the Core Apps project, you just need to install them. Because the Ubuntu Store wasn’t working for me (see bottom of this post) I had to manually download and install them:

If you want to use these apps in Unity 7 as well, you have to modify their .desktop files located in ~/.local/share/applications/ and add the -x flag after aa-exec-click, this is because by default it prevents running these apps under X11 where they won’t have the safety of confinement that they get under Mir.

The file manager needed a bit of extra effort to get working. It contains many Samba libraries that allow it to access windows network shares, but for some reason the app was looking for them in the wrong place. As a quick and dirty hack, I ended up copying whatever libraries it needed from /opt/click.ubuntu.com/com.ubuntu.filemanager/current/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ to /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/samba/. It’s worth the effort, though, because you need the file manager if you want do things like upload files through the webbrowser.

Using SSH

IRC is a vital communication tool for my job, we all use it every day. In fact, I find it so important that I have a remote client that stays connected 24/7, which I connect to via ssh. Thanks to the Terminal core app, I have quick and easy access to that. But when I first tried to connect to my server, which uses public-key authentication (as they all should), my connection was refused. That is because the Unity 8 session doesn’t run the ssh-agent service on startup. You can start it manually from the terminal:

ssh-agent

This will output some shell commands to setup environment variables, copy those and paste them right back into your terminal to set them. Then you should be able to ssh like normal, and if your key needs a passphrase you will be prompted for it in the terminal rather than in a dialog like you get in Unity 7.

Getting traditional apps

Now that you’ve got some apps running natively on Mir, you probably want to try out support for all of your traditional desktop apps, as you’ve heard advertised. This is done by a project called Libertine, which creates an LXC container and XMir to keep those unconfined apps safely away from your new properly confined setup. The first thing you will need to do is install the libertine packages:

apt-get install libertine libertine-scope

Once you have those, you will see a Libertine app in your Apps scope. This is the app that lets you manage your Libertine containers (yes, you can have more than one), and install apps into them. Creating a new container is simply a matter of pressing the “Install” button. You can give it a name of leave it blank to get the default “Xenial”.

Once your container is setup, you can install as many apps into it as you want, again using the Libertine container manager. You can even use it to search the archives if you don’t know the exact package name. It will also install any dependencies that package needs into your Libertine container.

Now that you have your container setup and apps installed into it, you are ready to start trying them out. For now you have to access them from a separate scope, since the default Apps scope doesn’t look into Libertine containers. That is why you had to install the libertine-scope package above. You can find this scope by clicking on the Dash’s bottom edge indicator to open the Scopes manger, and selecting the Legacy Applications Scope. There you will see launchers for the apps you have installed.

Libertine uses a special container manager to launch apps. If it isn’t running, as was the case for me, your legacy app windows will remain black. To fix that, open up the terminal and manually start the manager:

initctl --session start libertine-lxc-manager

Theming traditional apps

By default the legacy apps don’t look very nice. They default to the most basic of themes that look like you’ve time-traveled back to the mid-1990s, and nobody wants to do that. The reason for this is because these apps (or rather, the toolkit they use) expect certain system settings to tell them what theme to use, but those settings aren’t actually a dependency of the application’s package. They are part of a default desktop install, but not part of the default Libertine image.

I found a way to fix this, at least for some apps, by installing the light-themes and ubuntu-settings packages into the Libertine container. Specifically it should work for any Gtk3 based application, such as GEdit. It does not, however, work for apps that still use the Gtk2 toolkit, such as Geany. I have not dug deeper to try and figure out how to fix Gtk2 themes, if anybody has a suggestion please leave it in the comments.

What works

It has been a couple of months since I last tried the Unity 8 session, back before I upgraded to Xenial, and at that time there wasn’t much working. I went into this challenge expecting it to be better, but not by much. I honestly didn’t expect to spend even a full day using it. So I was really quite surprised to find that, once I found the workarounds above, I was not only able to spend the full day in it, but I was able to do so quite easily.

Whenever you have a new DE (which Unity 8 effectively is) and the latest UI toolkit (Qt 5) you have to be concerned about performance and resource use, and given the bleeding-edge nature of Unity 8 on the desktop, I was expecting to sacrifice some CPU cycles, battery life and RAM. If anything, the opposite was the case. I get at least as many hours on my battery as I do with Unity 7, and I was using less than half the RAM I typically do.

Moreover, things that I was expecting to cause me problems surprisingly didn’t. I was able to use Google Hangouts for my video conferences, which I knew had just been enabled in the browser. But I fully expected suspend/resume to have trouble with Mir, given the years I spent fighting it in X11 in the past, but it worked nearly flawlessly (see below). The network indicator had all of my VPN configurations waiting to be used, and they worked perfectly. Even pulse audio was working as well as it did in Unity 7, though this did introduce some problems (again, see below). It even has settings to adjust the mouse speed and disable the trackpad when I’m typing. Most imporantly, nearly all of the keyboard shortcuts that have become subconcious to me in Unity 7 are working in Unity 8.

Most importantly, I was able to write this blog post from Unity 8. That includes taking all of the screenshots and uploading them to WordPress. Switching back and forth between my browser and my notes document to see what I had done over the last few days, or going to the terminal to verify the commands I mentioned above.

What doesn’t

Of course, it wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows, Unity 8 is still very bleeding edge as a desktop shell, and if you want to use it you need to be prepared for some pain. None of it has so far been bad enough to stop me, but your mileage may vary.

One of the first minor pain-points is the fact that middle-click doesn’t paste the active text highlight. I hadn’t realized how much I have become dependent on that until I didn’t have it. You also can’t copy/paste between a Mir and an XMir window, which makes legacy apps somewhat less useful, but that’s on the roadmap to be fixed.

Speaking of windows, Unity 8 is still limited to one per app. This is going to change, but it is the current state of things. This doesn’t matter so much for native apps, which were build under this restriciton, and the terminal app having tabs was a saving grace here. But for legacy apps it presents a bigger issue, especially apps like GTG (Getting Things Gnome) where multi-window is a requirement.

Some power-management is missing too, such as dimming the screen after some amount of inactivity, or turning it off altogether. The session also will not lock when you suspend it, so don’t depend on this in a security-critical way (but really, if you’re running bleeding-edge desktops in security-critical environments, you have bigger problems).

I also had a minor problem with my USB headset. It’s actually a problem I have in Unity 7 too, since upgrading to Xenial the volume and mute controls don’t automatically switch to the headset, even though the audio output and input do. I had a workaround for that in Unity 7, I could open the sound settings and manually change it to the headset, at which point the controls work on it. But in Unity 8’s sound settings there is no such option, so my workaround isn’t available.

The biggest hurdle, from my perspective, was not being able to install apps from the store. This is due to something in the store scope, online accounts, or Ubuntu One, I haven’t figured out which yet. So to install anything, I had to get the .click package and do it manually. But asking around I seem to be the only one having this problem, so those of you who want to try this yourself may not have to worry about that.

The end?

No, not for me. I’m on day 3 of this 10 day challenge, and so far things are going well enough for me to continue. I have been posting regular small updates on Google+, and will keep doing so. If I have enough for a new blog post, I may write another one here, but for the most part keep an eye on my G+ feed. Add your own experiences there, and again join #ubuntu-unity if you get stuck or need help.

As most you you know by now, Ubuntu 16.04 will be dropping the old Ubuntu Software Center in favor of the newer Gnome Software as the graphical front-end to both the Ubuntu archives and 3rd party application store.

Gnome Software provides a lot of the same enhancements over simple package managers that USC did, and it does this using a new metadata format standard called AppStream. While much of the needed AppStream data can be extracted from the existing packages in the archives, sometimes that’s not sufficient, and that’s when we need people to help fill the gaps.

It turns out that the bulk of the missing or incorrect data is caused by the application icons being used by app packages. While most apps already have an icon, it was never strictly enforced before, and the size and format allowed by the desktop specs was more lenient than what’s needed now. These lower resolution icons might have been fine for a menu item, but they don’t work very well for a nice, beautiful App Store interface like Gnome Software. And that’s where you can help!

Don’t worry, contributing icons isn’t hard, and it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming or packing to do. Best of all, you’ll not only be helping Ubuntu, but you’ll also be contributing to any other distro that uses the AppStream standard too! In the steps below I will walk you through the process of finding an app in need, getting the correct icon for it, and contributing it to the upstream project and Ubuntu.

1) Pick an App

Because the AppStream data is being automatically extracted from the contents of existing packages, we are able to tell which apps are in need of new icons, and we’ve generated a list of them, sorted by popularity (based on PopCon stats) so you can prioritize your contributions to where they will help the most users. To start working on one, first click the “Create” link to file a new bug report against the package in Ubuntu. Then replace that link in the wiki with a link to your new bug, and put your name in the “Claimed” column so that others know you’ve already started work on it.

Note that a package can contain multiple .desktop files, each of which has it’s own icon, and your bug report will be specific to just that one metadata file. You will also need to be a member of the ~ubuntu-etherpad team (or sub-team like ~ubuntumembers) in order to edit the wiki, you will be asked to verify that membership as part of the login process with Ubuntu SSO.

2) Verify that an AppStream icon is needed

While the extraction process is capable of identifying what packages have a missing or unsupported image in them, it’s not always smart enough to know which packages should have this AppStream data in the first place. So before you get started working on icons, it’s best to first make sure that the metadata file you picked should be part of the AppStream index in the first place.

Because AppStream was designed to be application-centric, the metadata extraction process only looks at those with Type=Application in their .desktop file. It will also ignore any .desktop files with NoDisplay=True in them. If you find a file in the list that shouldn’t be indexed by AppStream, chances are one or both of these values are set incorrectly. In that case you should change your bug description to state that, rather than attaching an icon to it.

3) Contact Upstream

Since there is nothing Ubuntu-specific about AppStream data or icons, you really should be sending your contribution upstream to the originating project. Not only is this best for Ubuntu (carrying patches wastes resources), but it’s just the right thing to do in the open source community. So the after you’ve chosen an app to work on and verfied that it does in fact need a new icon for AppStream, the very next thing you should do is start talking to the upstream project developers.

Start by letting them know that you want to contribute to their project so that it integrates better with AppStream enabled stores (you can reference these Guidelines if they’re not familiar with it), and opening a similar bug report in their bug tracker if they don’t have one already. Finally, be sure to include a link to that upstream bug report in the Ubuntu bug you opened previously so that the Ubuntu developers know the work is also going into upstream to (your contribute might be rejected otherwise).

4) Find or Create an Icon

Chances are the upstream developers already have an icon that meets the AppStream requirements, so ask them about it before trying to find one on your own. If not, look for existing artwork assets that can be used as a logo, and remember that it needs to be at least 64×64 pixels (this is where SVGs are ideal, as they can be exported to any size). Whatever you use, make sure that it matches the application’s current branding, we’re not out to create a new logo for them after all. If you do create a new image file, you will need to make it available under the CC-BY-SA license.

While AppStream only requires a 64×64 pixel image, many desktops (including Unity) will benefit from having even higher resolution icons, and it’s always easier to scale them down than up. So if you have the option, try to provide a 256×256 icon image (or again, just an SVG).

5) Submit your icon

Now that you’ve found (or created) an appropriate icon, it’s time to get it into both the upstream project and Ubuntu. Because each upstream will be different in how they want you to do that, you will need to ask them for guidance (and possibly assistance) in order to do that. Just make sure that you update the upstream bug report with your work, so that the Ubuntu developers can see that it’s been done.

Ubuntu 16.04 has already synced with Debian, so it’s too late for these changes in the upstream project to make their way into this release. In order to get them into 16.04, the Ubuntu packages will have to carry a patch until the changes that land in upstream have the time to make their way into the Ubuntu archives. That’s why it’s so important to get your contribution accepted into the upstream project first, the Ubuntu developers want to know that the patches to their packages will eventually be replaced by the same change from upstream.

To submit your image to Ubuntu, all you need to do is attach the image file to the bug report you created way back in step #1.

Then, subscribe the “ubuntu-sponsors” team to the bug, these are the Ubuntu developers who will review and apply your icon to the target package, and get it into the Ubuntu archives.

6) Talk about it!

Congratulations, you’ve just made a contribution that is likely to affect millions of people and benefit the entire open source community! That’s something to celebrate, so take to Twitter, Google+, Facebook or your own blog and talk about it. Not only is it good to see people doing these kinds of contributions, it’s also highly motivating to others who might not otherwise get involved. So share your experience, help others who want to do the same, and if you enjoyed it feel free to grab another app from the list and do it again.

With the release of the Wily Werewolf (Ubuntu 15.10) we have entered into the Xenial Xerus (to be Ubuntu 16.04) development cycle. This will be another big milestone for Ubuntu, not just because it will be another LTS, but it will be the last LTS before we acheive convergence. What we do here will not only be supported for the next 5 years, it will set the stage for everything to come over that time as we bring the desktop, phone and internet-of-things together into a single comprehensive, cohesive platform.

To help get us there, we have a track dedicated to Convergence at this week’s Ubuntu Online Summit where we will be discussing plans for desktops, phones, IoT and how they are going to come together.

Thanks to the generous organizers of FOSSETCON who have given us a room at their venue, we will be having another UbuCon in Orlando this fall!

FOSSETCON 2015 will be held at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista‎, from November 19th through the 21st. This year they’ve been able to get Richard Stallman to attend and give a keynote, so it’s certainly an event worth attending for anybody who’s interested in free and open source software.

UbuCon itself will be held all day on the 19th in it’s own dedicate room at the venue. We are currently recruiting presenters to talk to attendees about some aspect of Ubuntu, from the cloud to mobile, community involved and of course the desktop. If you have a fun or interesting topic that you want to share with, please send your proposal to me at mhall119@ubuntu.com

Way back at the dawn of the open source era, Richard Stallman wrote the Four Freedoms which defined what it meant for software to be free. These are:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.

Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

For nearly three decades now they have been the foundation for our movement, the motivation for many of us, and the guiding principle for the decisions we make about what software to use.

But outside of our little corner of humanity, these freedoms are not seen as particularly important. In fact, the fast majority of people are not only happy to use software that violates them, but will often prefer to do so. I don’t even feel the need to provide supporting evidence for this claim, as I’m sure all of you have been on one side or the other of a losing arguement about why using open source software is important.

The problem, it seems, is that people who don’t plan on exercising any of these freedoms, from lack of interest or lack of ability, don’t place the same value on them as those of us who do. That’s why software developers are more likely to prefer open source than non-developers, because they might actually use those freedoms at some point.

But the people who don’t see a personal value in free software are missing a larger, more important freedom. One implied by the first four, though not specifically stated. A fifth freedom if you will, which I define as:

Freedom 4: The freedom to have the program improved by a person or persons of your choosing, and make that improvement available back to you and to the public.

Because even though the vast majority of proprietary software users will never be interested in studying or changing the source of the software they use, they will likely all, at some point in time, ask someone else if they can fix it. Who among us hasn’t had a friend or relative ask us to fix their Windows computer? And the true answer is that, without having the four freedoms (and implied fifth), only Microsoft can truly “fix” their OS, the rest of us can only try and undo the damage that’s been done.

So the next time you’re trying to convince someone of the important of free and open software, and they chime in with the fact that don’t want to change it, try pointing out that by using proprietary code they’re limiting their options for getting it fixed when it inevitably breaks.

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the thirteenth Southern California Linux Expo, more commonly known at SCaLE 13x. It was my first time back in five years, since I attended 9x, and my first time as a speaker. I had a blast at SCaLE, and a wonderful time with UbuCon. If you couldn’t make it this year, it should definitely be on your list of shows to attend in 2016.

UbuCon

Thanks to the efforts of Richard Gaskin, we had a room all day Friday to hold an UbuCon. For those of you who haven’t attended an UbuCon before, it’s basically a series of presentations by members of the Ubuntu community on how to use it, contribute to it, or become involved in the community around it. SCaLE was one of the pioneering host conferences for these, and this year they provided a double-sized room for us to use, which we still filled to capacity.

I was given the chance to give not one but two talks during UbuCon, one on community and one on the Ubuntu phone. We also had presentations from my former manager and good friend Jono Bacon, current coworkers Jorge Castro and Marco Ceppi, and inspirational community members Philip Ballew and Richard Gaskin.

I’d like thank Richard for putting this all together, and for taking such good care of those of us speaking (he made sure we always had mints and water). UbuCon was a huge success because of the amount of time and work he put into it. Thanks also to Canonical for providing us, on rather short notice, a box full of Ubuntu t-shirts to give away. And of course thanks to the SCaLE staff and organizers for providing us the room and all of the A/V equipment in it to use.

The room was recorded all day, so each of these sessions can be watched now on youtube. My own talks are at 4:00:00 and 5:00:00.

Ubuntu Booth

In addition to UbuCon, we also had an Ubuntu booth in the SCaLE expo hall, which was registered and operated by members of the Ubuntu California LoCo team. These guys were amazing, they ran the booth all day over all three days, managed the whole setup and tear down, and did an excellent job talking to everybody who came by and explaining everything from Ubuntu’s cloud offerings, to desktops and even showing off Ubuntu phones.

Our booth wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of Luis Caballero, Matt Mootz, Jose Antonio Rey, Nathan Haines, Ian Santopietro, George Mulak, and Daniel Gimpelevich, so thank you all so much! We also had great support from Carl Richell at System76 who let us borrow 3 of their incredible laptops running Ubuntu to show off our desktop, Canonical who loaned us 2 Nexus 4 phones running Ubuntu as well as one of the Orange Box cloud demonstration boxes, Michael Newsham from TierraTek who sent us a fanless PC and NAS, which we used to display a constantly-repeating video (from Canonical’s marketing team) showing the Ubuntu phone’s Scopes on a television monitor provided to us by Eäär Oden at Video Resources. Oh, and of course Stuart Langridge, who gave up his personal, first-edition Bq Ubuntu phone for the entire weekend so we could show it off at the booth.

Like Ubuntu itself, this booth was not the product of just one organization’s work, but the combination of efforts and resources from many different, but connected, individuals and groups. We are what we are, because of who we all are. So thank you all for being a part of making this booth amazing.

There’s a saying in American political debate that is as popular as it is wrong, which happens when one side appeals to our country’s democratic ideal, and the other side will immediately counter with “The United States is a Republic, not a Democracy”. I’ve noticed a similar misunderstanding happening in open source culture around the phrase “meritocracy” and the negatively-charged “oligarchy”. In both cases, though, these are not mutually exclusive terms. In fact, they don’t even describe the same thing.

Authority

One of these terms describes where the authority to lead (or govern) comes from. In US politics, that’s the term “republic”, which means that the authority of the government is given to it by the people (as opposed to divine-right, force of arms, of inheritance). For open source, this is where “meritocracy” fits in, it describes the authority to lead and make decisions as coming from the “merit” of those invested with it. Now, merit is hard to define objectively, and in practice it’s the subjective opinion of those who can direct a project’s resources that decides who has “merit” and who doesn’t. But it is still an important distinction from projects where the authority to lead comes from ownership (either by the individual or their employer) of a project.

Enfranchisement

History can easily provide a long list of Republics which were not representative of the people. That’s because even if authority comes from the people, it doesn’t necessarily come from all of the people. The USA can be accurately described as a democracy, in addition to a republic, because participation in government is available to (nearly) all of the people. Open source projects, even if they are in fact a meritocracy, will vary in what percentage of their community are allowed to participate in leading them. As I mentioned above, who has merit is determined subjectively by those who can direct a project’s resources (including human resource), and if a project restricts that to only a select group it is in fact also an oligarchy.

Balance and Diversity

One of the criticisms leveled against meritocracies is that they don’t produce diversity in a project or community. While this is technically true, it’s not a failing of meritocracy, it’s a failing of enfranchisement, which as has been described above is not what the term meritocracy defines. It should be clear by now that meritocracy is a spectrum, ranging from the democratic on one end to the oligarchic on the other, with a wide range of options in between.

The Ubuntu project is, in most areas, a meritocracy. We are not, however, a democracy where the majority opinion rules the whole. Nor are we an oligarchy, where only a special class of contributors have a voice. We like to use the term “do-ocracy” to describe ourselves, because enfranchisement comes from doing, meaning making a contribution. And while it is limited to those who do make contributions, being able to make those contributions in the first place is open to anybody. It is important for us, and part of my job as a Community Manager, to make sure that anybody with a desire to contribute has the information, resources, and access to to so. That is what keeps us from sliding towards the oligarchic end of the spectrum.

The Ubuntu Core Apps project has proven that the Ubuntu community is not only capable of building fantastic software, but they’re capable of the meeting the same standards, deadlines and requirements that are expected from projects developed by employees. One of the things that I think made Core Apps so successful was the project management support that they all received from Alan Pope.

Project management is common, even expected, for software developed commercially, but it’s just as often missing from community projects. It’s time to change that. I’m kicking off a new personal[1] project, I’m calling it the Ubuntu Incubator.

The purpose of the Incubator is to help community projects bootstrap themselves, obtain the resources they need to run their project, and put together a solid plan that will set them on a successful, sustainable path.

To that end I’m going to devote one month to a single project at a time. I will meet with the project members regularly (weekly or every-other week), help define a scope for their project, create a spec, define work items and assign them to milestones. I will help them get resources from other parts of the community and Canonical when they need them, promote their work and assist in recruiting contributors. All of the important things that a project needs, other than direct contributions to the final product.

I’m intentionally keeping the scope of my involvement very focused and brief. I don’t want to take over anybody’s project or be a co-founder. I will take on only one project at a time, so that project gets all of my attention during their incubation period. The incubation period itself is very short, just one month, so that I will focus on getting them setup, not on running them. Once I finish with one project, I will move on to the next[2].

How will I choose which project to incubate? Since it’s my time, it’ll be my choice, but the most important factor will be whether or not a project is ready to be incubated. “Ready” means they are more than just an idea: they are both possible to accomplish and feasible to accomplish with the person or people already involved, the implementation details have been mostly figured out, and they just need help getting the ball rolling. “Ready” also means it’s not an existing project looking for a boost, while we need to support those projects too, that’s not what the Incubator is for.

So, if you have a project that’s ready to go, but you need a little help taking that first step, you can let me know by adding your project’s information to this etherpad doc[3]. I’ll review each one and let you know if I think it’s ready, needs to be defined a little bit more, or not a good candidate. Then each month I’ll pick one and reach out to them to get started.

Now, this part is important: don’t wait for me! I want to speed up community innovation, not slow it down, so even if I add your project to the “Ready” queue, keep on doing what you would do otherwise, because I have no idea when (or if) I will be able to get to yours. Also, if there are any other community leaders with project management experience who have the time and desire to help incubate one of these project, go ahead and claim it and reach out to that team.

[1] While this compliments my regular job, it’s not something I’ve been asked to do by Canonical, and to be honest I have enough Canonical-defined tasks to consume my working hours. This is me with just my community hat on, and I’m inclined to keep it that way.

[2] I’m not going to forget about projects after their month is up, but you get 100% of the time I spend on incubation during your month, after that my time will be devoted to somebody else.

[3] I’m using Etherpad to keep the process as lightweight as possible, if we need something better in the future we’ll adopt it then.

A couple of weeks ago we announced the start of a contest to write new Unity Scopes. These are the Dash plugins that let you search for different kinds of content from different sources. Last week Alan Pope posted his Scopes Wishlist detailing the ones he would like to see. And while I think they’re all great ideas, they didn’t particularly resonate with my personal use cases. So I’ve decided to put together a wishlist of my own:

Ubuntu Community

I’ve started on one of these in the past, more to test-drive the Scope API and documentation (both of which have changed somewhat since then), but our community has a rather large amount of content available via open APIs or feeds, that could be combined into making one really great scope. My attempt used the LoCo Team Portal API, but there is also the Planet Ubuntu RSS feed (also feeds from a number of other websites), iCal feeds from Summit, a Google calendar for UbuntuOnAir, etc. There’s a lot of community data out there just waiting to be surfaced to Ubuntu users.

Open States

My friend Paul Tagliamante works for the Sunlight Foundation, which provides access to a huge amount of local law and political data (open culture + government, how cool is that?), including the Open States website which provides more local information for those of us in the USA. Now only could a scope use these APIs to make it easy for us citizens to keep up with that’s going on in our governments, it’s a great candidate to use the Location information to default you to local data no matter where you are.

Desktop

This really only has a purpose on Unity 8 on the desktop, and even then only for a short term until a normal desktop is implemented. But for now it would be a nice way to view your desktop files and such. I think that a Scope’s categories and departments might provide a unique opportunity to re-think how we use the desktop too, with the different files organized by type, sorted by date, and displayed in a way that suits it’s content.

There’s potential here to do some really interesting things, I’m just not sure what they are. If one of you intrepid developers has some good ideas, though, give it a shot.

Comics

Let’s be honest, I love web comics, you love web comics, we all love web comic. Wouldn’t it be super awesome if you got the newest, best webcomics on your Dash? Think about it, get your XKCD, SMBC or The Oatmeal delivered every day. Okay, it might be a productivity killer, but still, I’d install it.

Next week we will be kicking off the November 2014 Ubuntu Online Summit where people from the Ubuntu community and Canonical will be hosting live video sessions talking about what is being worked on, what is currently available, and what the future holds across all of the Ubuntu ecosystem.

We are in the process of recruiting sessions and filling out the Summit Schedule for this event, which should be finalized at the start of next week. You can register that you are attending on the Summit website, where you can also mark specific sessions that you are interested in and get a personalized view of your schedule (and an available iCal feed too!) UOS is designed for participation, not just consumption. Every session will have active IRC channel that goes along with it where you can speak directly to the people on video. For discussion sessions, you’re encouraged to join the video yourself when you want to join the conversation.

Moreover, we want you to host sessions! Anybody who has an idea for a good topic for conversation, presentation, or planning and is willing to host the video (meaning you need to run a Google On-Air Hangout) can propose a session. You don’t need to be a Canonical employee, project leader, or even an Ubuntu member to run a session, all you need is a topic and a willingness to be the person to drive it. And don’t worry, we have track leads who have volunteered to help you get it setup.

These sessions will be split into tracks, so you can follow along with the topics that interest you. Or you can jump from track to track to see what everybody else in the community is doing. And if you want to host a session yourself, you can contact any one of the friendly Track Leads, who will help you get it registered and on the schedule.

Ubuntu Development

Those who have participated in the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in the past will find the same kind of platform-focused topics and discussions in the Ubuntu Development track. This track covers everything from the kernel to packaging, desktops and all of the Ubuntu flavors.

App & Scope Development

For developers who are targeting the Ubuntu platform, for both apps and Unity scopes, we will be featuring a number of presentations on the current state of the tools, APIs and documentation, as well as gathering feedback from those who have been using them to help us improve upon them in Ubuntu 15.04. You will also see a lot of planning for the Ubuntu Core Apps, and some showcases of other apps or technologies that developers are creating.

Cloud & DevOps

Going beyond the core and client side, Ubuntu is making a lot of waves in the cloud and server market these days, and there’s no better place to learn about what we’re building (and help us build it) that the Cloud & Devops track. Whether you want to roll out your own OpenStack cloud, or make your web service easy to deploy and scale out, you will find topics here that interest you.

Community

The Ubuntu Online Summit is itself a community coordinated event, and we’ve got a track dedicated to helping us improve and grow the whole community. You can use this to showcase the amazing work that your team has been doing, or plan out new events and projects for the coming cycle. The Community Team from canonical will be there, as well as members of the various councils, flavors and boards that provide governance for the Ubuntu project.

Users

And of course we can’t forget about our millions or users, we have a whole track setup just to provide them with resources and presentations that will help them make the most out Ubuntu. If you have been working on a project for Ubuntu, you should think about hosting a session on this track to show it off. We’ll also be hosting several feedback session to hear directly from users about what works, what doesn’t, and how we can improve.

This is a guest post from Will Cooke, the new Desktop Team manager at Canonical. It’s being posted here while we work to get a blog setup on unity.ubuntu.com, which is where you can find out more about Unity 8 and how to get involved with it.

Intro

Understandably, most of the Ubuntu news recently has focused around phones. There is a lot of excitement and anticipation building around the imminent release of the first devices. However, the Ubuntu Desktop has not been dormant during this time. A lot of thought and planning has been given to what the desktop will become in the future; who will use it and what will they use it for. All the work which is going in to the phone will be directly applicable to the desktop as well, since they will use the same code. All the apps, the UI tweaks, everything which makes applications secure and stable will all directly apply to the desktop as well. The plan is to have the single converged operating system ready for use on the desktop by 16.04.

The plan

We learned some lessons during the early development of Unity 7. Here’s what happened:

11.04: New Unity as default

11.10: New Unity version

12.04: Unity in First LTS

What we’ve decided to do this time is to keep the same, stable Unity 7 desktop as the default while we offer users who want to opt-in to Unity8 an option to use that desktop. As development continues the Unity 8 desktop will get better and better. It will benefit from a lot of the advances which have come about through the development of the phone OS and will benefit from continual improvements as the releases happen.

14.04 LTS: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 option for the first time

14.10: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 new rev as an option

15.04: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 new rev as an option

15.10: Potentially Unity 8 default / Unity 7 as an option

16.04 LTS: Unity 8 default / Unity 7 as an option

As you can see, this gives us a full 2 cycles (in addition to the one we’ve already done) to really nail Unity 8 with the level of quality that people expect. So what do we have?

How will we deliver Unity 8 with better quality than 7?

Continuous Integration is the best way for us to achieve and maintain the highest quality possible. We have put a lot of effort in to automating as much of the testing as we can, the best testing is that which is performed easily. Before every commit the changes get reviewed and approved – this is the first line of defense against bugs. Every merge request triggers a run of the tests, the second line of defense against bugs and regressions – if a change broke something we find out about it before it gets in to the build.

The CI process builds everything in a “silo”, a self contained & controlled environment where we find out if everything works together before finally landing in the image.

And finally, we have a large number of tests which run against those images. This really is a “belt and braces” approach to software quality and it all happens automatically. You can see, we are taking the quality of our software very seriously.

What about Unity 7?

Unity 7 and Compiz have a team dedicated to maintenance and bug fixes and so the quality of it continues to improve with every release. For example; windows switching workspaces when a monitor gets unplugged is fixed, if you have a mouse with 6 buttons it works, support for the new version of Metacity (incase you want to use the Gnome2 desktop) – added (and incidentally, a lot of that work was done by a community contributor – thanks Alberts!)

Unity 7 is the desktop environment for a lot of software developers, devops gurus, cloud platform managers and millions of users who rely on it to help them with their everyday computing. We don’t want to stop you being able to get work done. This is why we continue to maintain Unity 7 while we develop Unity 8. If you want to take Unity 8 for a spin and see how its coming along then you can; if you want to get your work done, we’re making that experience better for you every day. Best of all, both of these options are available to you with no detriment to the other.

Things that we’re getting in the new Ubuntu Desktop

Applications decoupled from the OS updates. Traditionally a given release of Ubuntu has shipped with the versions of the applications available at the time of release. Important updates and security fixes are back-ported to older releases where required, but generally you had to wait for the next release to get the latest and greatest set of applications. The new desktop packaging system means that application developers can push updates out when they are ready and the user can benefit right away.

Application isolation. Traditionally applications can access anything the user can access; photos, documents, hardware devices, etc. On other platforms this has led to data being stolen or rendered otherwise unusable. Isolation means that without explicit permission any Click packaged application is prevented from accessing data you don’t want it to access.

A full SDK for writing Ubuntu apps. The SDK which many people are already using to write apps for the phone will allow you to write apps for the desktop as well. In fact, your apps will be write once run anywhere – you don’t need to write a “desktop” app or a “phone” app, just an Ubuntu app.

What we have now

The easiest way to try out the Unity 8 Desktop Preview is to use the daily Ubuntu Desktop Next live image: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-desktop-next/daily-live/current/ This will allow you to boot into a Unity 8 session without touching your current installation. An easy 10 step way to write this image to a USB stick is:

Download the ISO

Insert your USB stick in the knowledge that it’s going to get wiped

Open the “Disks” application

Choose your USB stick and click on the cog icon on the righthand side

Choose “Restore Disk Image”

Browse to and select the ISO you downloaded in #1

Click “Start restoring”

Wait

Boot and select “Try Ubuntu….”

Done *

* Please note – there is currently a bug affecting the Unity 8 greeter which means you are not automatically logged in when you boot the live image. To log in you need to:

Switch to vt1 (ctrl-alt-f1)

type “passwd” and press enter

press enter again to set the current password to blank

enter a new password twice

Check that the password has been successfully changed

Switch back to vt7 (ctrl-alt-f7)

Enter the new password to login

Here are some screenshots showing what Unity 8 currently looks like on the desktop:

The team

The people working on the new desktop are made up of a few different disciplines. We have a team dedicated to Unity 7 maintenance and bug fixes who are also responsible for Unity 8 on the desktop and feed in a lot of support to the main Unity 8 & Mir teams. We have the Ubuntu Desktop team who are responsible for many aspects of the underlying technologies used such as GNOME libraries, settings, printing etc as well as the key desktop applications such as Libreoffice and Chromium. The Ubuntu desktop team has some of the longest serving members of the Ubuntu family, with some people having been here for the best part of ten years.

How you can help

We need to log all the bugs which need to be fixed in order to make Unity 8 the best desktop there is. Firstly, we need people to test the images and log bugs. If developers want to help fix those bugs, so much the better. Right now we are focusing on identifying where the work done for the phone doesn’t work as expected on the desktop. Once those bugs are logged and fixed we can rely on the CI system described above to make sure that they stay fixed.

So it’s finally happened, one of my first Ubuntu SDK apps has reached an official 1.0 release. And I think we all know what that means. Yup, it’s time to scrap the code and start over.

It’s a well established mantra, codified by Fred Brooks, in software development that you will end up throwing away the first attempt at a new project. The releases between 0.1 and 0.9 are a written history of your education about the problem, the tools, or the language you are learning. And learn I did, I wrote a whole series of posts about my adventures in writing uReadIt. Now it’s time to put all of that learning to good use.

Often times projects still spend an extremely long time in this 0.x stage, getting ever closer but never reaching that 1.0 release. This isn’t because they think 1.0 should wait until the codebase is perfect, I don’t think anybody expects 1.0 to be perfect. 1.0 isn’t the milestone of success, it’s the crossing of the Rubicon, the point where drastic change becomes inevitable. It’s the milestone where the old code, with all it’s faults, dies, and out of it is born a new codebase.

So now I’m going to start on uReadIt 2.0, starting fresh, with the latest Ubuntu UI Toolkit and platform APIs. It won’t be just a feature-for-feature rewrite either, I plan to make this a great Reddit client for both the phone and desktop user. To that end, I plan to add the following:

A full Javascript library for interacting with the Reddit API

User account support, which additionally will allow:

Posting articles & comments

Reading messages in your inbox

Upvoting and downvoting articles and comments

Convergence from the start, so it’s usable on the desktop as well

Re-introduce link sharing via Content-Hub

Take advantage of new features in the UITK such as UbuntuListView filtering & pull-to-refresh, and left/right swipe gestures on ListItems

Another change, which I talked about in a previous post, will be to the license of the application. Where uReadIt 1.0 is GPLv3, the next release will be under a BSD license.

Two years ago, my wife and I made the decision to home-school our two children. It was the best decision we could have made, our kids are getting a better education, and with me working from home since joining Canonical I’ve been able to spend more time with them than ever before. We also get to try and do some really fun things, which is what sets the stage for this story.

Both my kids love science, absolutely love it, and it’s one of our favorite subjects to teach. A couple of weeks ago my wife found an inexpensive USB microscope, which lets you plug it into a computer and take pictures using desktop software. It’s not a scientific microscope, nor is it particularly powerful or clear, but for the price it was just right to add a new aspect to our elementary science lessons. All we had to do was plug it in and start exploring.

My wife has a relatively new (less than a year) laptop running windows 8. It’s not high-end, but it’s all new hardware, new software, etc. So when we plugged in our simple USB microscope…….it failed. As in, didn’t do anything. Windows seemed to be trying to figure out what to do with it, over and over and over again, but to no avail.

My laptop, however, is running Ubuntu 14.04, the latest stable and LTS release. My laptop is a couple of years old, but classic, Lenovo x220. It’s great hardware to go with Ubuntu and I’ve had nothing but good experiences with it. So of course, when I decided to give our new USB microsope a try……it failed. The connection was fine, the log files clearly showed that it was being identified, but nothing was able to see it as a video input device or make use of it.

Now, if that’s where our story ended, it would fall right in line with a Shakespearean tragedy. But while both Windows and Ubuntu failed to “just work” with this microscope, both failures were not equal. Because the Windows drivers were all closed source, my options ended with that failure.

But on Ubuntu, the drivers were open, all I needed to do was find a fix. It took a while, but I eventually found a 2.5 year old bug report for an identical chipset to my microscope, and somebody proposed a code fix in the comments. Now, the original reporter never responded to say whether or not the fix worked, and it was clearly never included in the driver code, but it was an opportunity. Now I’m no kernel hacker, nor driver developer, in fact I probably shouldn’t be trusted to write any amount of C code at all. But because I had Ubuntu, getting the source code of my current driver, as well as all the tools and dependencies needed to build it, took only a couple of terminal commands. The patch was too old to cleanly apply to the current code, but it was easy enough to figure out where they should go, and after a couple tries to properly build just the driver (and not the full kernel or every driver in it), I had a new binary kernel modules that would load without error. Then, when I plugged my USB microscope in again, it worked!

People use open source for many reasons. Some people use it because it’s free as in beer, for them it’s on the same level as freeware or shareware, only the cost matters. For others it’s about ethics, they would choose open source even if it cost them money or didn’t work as well, because they feel it’s morally right, and that proprietary software is morally wrong. I use open source because of USB microscopes. Because when they don’t work, open source gives me a chance to change that.

Ever since we started building the Ubuntu SDK, we’ve been trying to find ways of bringing the vast number of Android apps that exist over to Ubuntu. As with any new platform, there’s a chasm between Android apps and native apps that can only be crossed through the effort of porting.

There are simple solutions, of course, like providing an Android runtime on Ubuntu. On other platforms, those have shown to present Android apps as second-class citizens that can’t benefit from a new platform’s unique features. Worse, they don’t provide a way for apps to gradually become first-class citizens, so chasm between Android and native still exists, which means the vast majority of apps supported this way will never improve.

There are also complicates solutions, like code conversion, that try to translate Android/Java code into the native platform’s language and toolkit, preserving logic and structure along the way. But doing this right becomes such a monumental task that making a tool to do it is virtually impossible, and the amount of cleanup and checking needed to be done by an actual developer quickly rises to the same level of effort as a manual port would have. This approach also fails to take advantage of differences in the platforms, and will re-create the old way of doing things even when it doesn’t make sense on the new platform.

NDR takes a different approach to these, it doesn’t let you run our Android code on Ubuntu, nor does it try to convert your Android code to native code. Instead NDR will re-create the general framework of your Android app as a native Ubuntu app, converting Activities to Pages, for example, to give you a skeleton project on which you can build your port. It won’t get you over the chasm, but it’ll show you the path to take and give you a head start on it. You will just need to fill it in with the logic code to make it behave like your Android app. NDR won’t provide any of logic for you, and chances are you’ll want to do it slightly differently than you did in Android anyway, due to the differences between the two platforms.

To test NDR during development, I chose the Telegram app because it was open source, popular, and largely used Android’s layout definitions and components. NDR will be less useful against apps such as games, that use their own UI components and draw directly to a canvas, but it’s pretty good at converting apps that use Android’s components and UI builder.

After only a couple days of hacking I was able to get NDR to generate enough of an Ubuntu SDK application that, with a little bit of manual cleanup, it was recognizably similar to the Android app’s.

This proves, in my opinion, that bootstrapping an Ubuntu port based on Android source code is not only possible, but is a viable way of supporting Android app developers who want to cross that chasm and target their apps for Ubuntu as well. I hope it will open the door for high-quality, native Ubuntu app ports from the Android ecosystem. There is still much more NDR can do to make this easier, and having people with more Android experience than me (that would be none) would certainly make it a more powerful tool, so I’m making it a public, open source project on Launchpad and am inviting anybody who has an interest in this to help me improve it.

I’ve been using Ubuntu on my only phone for over six months now, and I’ve been loving it. But all this time it’s been missing something, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then, Saturday night, it finally hit me, it’s missing the community.

That’s not to say that the community isn’t involved in building it, all of the core apps have been community developed, as have several parts of our toolkit and even the platform itself. Everything about Ubuntu for phones is open source and open to the community.

But the community wasn’t on my phone. Their work was, but not the people. I have Facebook and Google+ and Twitter, sure, but everybody is on those, and you have to either follow or friend people there to see anything from them. I wanted something that put the community of Ubuntu phone users, on my Ubuntu phone. So, I started to make one.

Community Cast

Community Cast is a very simple, very basic, public message broadcasting service for Ubuntu. It’s not instant messaging, or social networking. It doesn’t to chat rooms or groups. It isn’t secure, at all. It does just one thing, it lets you send a short message to everybody else who uses it. It’s a place to say hello to other users of Ubuntu phone (or tablet). That’s it, that’s all.

As I mentioned at the start, I only realized what I wanted Saturday night, but after spending just a few hours on it, I’ve managed to get a barely functional client and server, which I’m making available now to anybody who wants to help build it.

Server

The server piece is a very small Django app, with a single BroadcastMessage data model, and the Django Rest Framework that allows you to list and post messages via JSON. To keep things simple, it doesn’t do any authentication yet, so it’s certainly not ready for any kind of production use. I would like it to get Ubuntu One authentication information from the client, but I’m still working out how to do that. I threw this very basic server up on our internal testing OpenStack cloud already, but it’s running the built-in http server and an sqlite3 database, so if it slows to a crawl or stops working don’t be surprised. Like I said, it’s not production ready. But if you want to help me get it there, you can get the code with bzr branch lp:~mhall119/+junk/communitycast-server, then just run syncdb and runserver to start it.

Client

The client is just as simple and unfinished as the server (I’ve only put a few hours into them both combined, remember?), but it’s enough to use. Again there’s no authentication, so anybody with the client code can post to my server, but I want to use the Ubuntu Online Accounts to authenticate a user via their Ubuntu One account. There’s also no automatic updating, you have to press the refresh button in the toolbar to check for new messages. But it works. You can get the code for it with bzr branch lp:~mhall119/+junk/communitycast-client and it will by default connect to my test instance. If you want to run your own server, you can change the baseUrl property on the MessageListModel to point to your local (or remote) server.

Screenshots

There isn’t much to show, but here’s what it looks like right now. I hope that there’s enough interest from others to get some better designs for the client and help implementing them and filling out the rest of the features on both the client and server.

Not bad for a few hours of work. I have a functional client and server, with the server even deployed to the cloud. Developing for Ubuntu is proving to be extremely fast and easy.

Yesterday we made a big step towards developing a native email client for Ubuntu, which uses the Ubuntu UI Toolkit and will converge between between phones, tablets and the desktop from the start.

We’re not starting from scratch though, we’re building on top of the incredible work done in the Trojitá project. Trojitá provides a fast, light email client built with Qt, which made it ideal for using with Ubuntu. And yesterday, the first of that work was accepted into upstream, you can now build an Ubuntu Components front end to Trojitá.

None of this would have been possible without the help up Trojitá’s upstream developer Jan Kundrát, who patiently helped me learn the codebase, and also the basics of CMake and Git so that I could make this first contribution. It also wouldn’t have been possible without the existing work by Ken VanDine and Joseph Mills, who both worked on the build configuration and some initial QML code that I used. Thanks also to Dan Chapman for working together with me to get this contribution into shape and accepted upstream.

This is just the start, now comes the hard work of actually building the new UI with the Ubuntu UI Toolkit. Andrea Del Sarto has provided some fantastic UI mockups already which we can use as a start, but there’s still a need for a more detailed visual and UX design. If you want to be part of that work, I’ve documented how to get the code and how to contribute on the EmailClient wiki. You can also join the next IRC meeting at 1400 UTC today in #ubuntu-touch-meeting on Freenode.

Starting at 1400 UTC today, and continuing all week long, we will be hosting a series of online classes covering many aspects of Ubuntu application development. We have experts both from Canonical and our always amazing community who will be discussing the Ubuntu SDK, QML and HTML5 development, as well as the new Click packaging and app store.

We’re using a new format for this year’s app developer week. As you can tell from the link above, we’re using the Summit website. It will work much like the virtual UDS, where each session will have a page containing an embedded YouTube video that will stream the presenter’s hangout, an embedded IRC chat window that will log you into the correct channel, and an Etherpad document where the presenter can post code examples, notes, or any other text.

Use the chatroom like you would an Ubuntu On Air session, start your questions with “QUESTION:” and wait for the presenter to get to it. After the session is over, the recorded video will be available on that page for you to replay later. If you register yourself as attending on the website (requires a Launchpad profile), you can mark yourself as attending those sessions you are interested in, and Summit can then give you a personalize schedule as well as an ical feed you can subscribe to in your calendar.

Today we announced the start of the next Ubuntu App Showdown, and I have very high hopes for the kinds of apps we’ll see this time around. Our SDK has grown by leaps and bounds since the last one, and so much more is possible now. So go get yourself started now: http://developer.ubuntu.com/apps/

Earlier today Jono posted his Top 5 Dream Ubuntu Apps, and they all sound great. I don’t have any specific apps I’d like to see, but I would love to get some multi-player games. Nothing fancy, nothing 3D or FPS. Think more like Draw Something or Words With Friends, something casual, turn-based, that lets me connect with other Ubuntu device users. A clone of one of those would be fun, but let’s try and come up with something original, something unique to Ubuntu.